RSG Analyst to Present at 54th Annual Transportation Research Forum

RSG's Kaveh Shabani will be presenting his paper, “Accounting for Special Commodity Movements in Statewide Freight Modeling: Coal, Oil & Gas in the Utah Statewide Freight Forecasting Model,” at the 54th Annual Transportation Research Forum. This work focuses on the reasons why additional data resources were needed in the Utah Statewide freight model and how these were used to overcome initial data deficiencies. The paper includes a description of the data and approaches used as well as a brief contextual overview of the Utah Statewide freight model, including an evaluation and discussion of the unique trends of coal movements in terms of value and tonnage shares compared to other states using Commodity Flow Survey data and the inter-modal considerations in the modeling process, its impacts on the accuracy of the model and the limitations of standard data sources in capturing inter-modal freight movements. Last, lessons learned are discussed to assist other regions seeking to develop similar freight modeling approaches.